TPP vs. RCEP

The TPP (Trans- Pacific Partnership) is a multinational trade agreement between 12 countries namely, USA, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and Japan.

Each nation wanted to end the negotiation in 2012, but there were a few issues such as agriculture, Intellectual Property and investments which caused the negotiations to continue.

South Korea did not participate in the 2006 agreement, but showed interest in entering the TPP agreement. The other countries interested in the agreement are Taiwan, the Philippines and Colombia as of 2010; Thailand and Laos as of 2012; Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh and India as of 2013.

The RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership is another FTA negotiation that has developed among 16 countries; the 10 members of ASEAN (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) and the six countries with which ASEAN has existing Free Trade Agreements (FTA) – Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea and New Zealand. In relation to RCEP these six non-ASEAN countries are known as the ASEAN Free Trade Partners. In between these countries seven have already signed the TPP Agreement and the others are interested in the TPP membership. So we can presume that these two agreement member countries will come under one umbrella to create new vast free trade zone.

-Atanu Mistry

The Biggest Problem in Piracy

Rocky Ouprasith, 23, the founder of the website RockDizMusic.com, a Cyberlocker site that made it easy to download songs, was sentenced to three years in prison in November, 2015. He was also ordered to pay USD 99,139.67.
Ourpasith started the site in 2011, hosting user content on servers in France and Canada and ran a similar website in Russia and the Netherlands. The site was seized by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, in 2014.
Ouprasith admitted to obtaining copies of copyrighted songs and albums from on-line sources and encouraged others, whom he called 'affiliates', to upload music to the website. He agreed to pay these 'affiliates' based on the number of file downloads. In his plea agreement, Ouprasith admitted the market value pf the illegally obtained material to be approximated more than USD 3.5 million.
Cyberloacker is an on-line service that allows users to store and share large files. Cyberlocker websites have several uses. they're useful for sharing copyrighted maerial. while the major services don't provide search engnes themselves, there are a number of third party search-engines that do. a search for a popular movie or television show on one of these specialised search engines, like Filestube.com , shows there is plenty of pirated material that can be easily accessed through these cyberlocker websites.
after all this commotion, the cyberlocker companies made it clear that they weren't going to sit around. Just a day after the MarkMonitorreport came out citing RapidShare as a 'top digital piracy service', RapidShare fired out an indignant press release saying it might sue for defamation. A day later, Mega Upload (another cyberlocker service holder) pushed back in a similar manner.

- Atanu Mistry